Pitt to merge SIS, CS department; The Pitt News, 2/11/16

Taylor Mulcahey, The Pitt News; Pitt to merge SIS, CS department:

"Within the next year and a half, Pitt’s computer science department and school of information science will become one.

The new undergraduate school, the School of Computing Informatics, is slated to accept its first students in the fall of 2017 and will combine the 32 SIS faculty with the 18 CS faculty and distribute the 50-person staff in three new departments: computer science, informatics and network systems and information culture and data stewardship...

A “shift from a singular focus on high performance computing to embracing big data, data analytics, [and] the interaction between computation and information, is driving the department merger,” Larsen said.

A growing number of other universities around the country, such as University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan, Indiana University and Drexel University, have reorganized their programs in similar ways.

For Pitt, the change comes as the University looks to shift its focus to big data projects. In March 2015, Pitt teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University and UPMC to form the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a partnership to find new ways to use large sets of patient data in health care.

In October 2015, Pitt collaborated with UPMC, CMU and other city and county officials to open the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, which has published city and county data, such as logs of the city’s 311 calls and information about opioid deaths, online."

Healthful alliance: UPMC, Pitt and CMU join forces in a big way; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/19/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Healthful alliance: UPMC, Pitt and CMU join forces in a big way:

"The announcement Monday by the heads of UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University that they were forming the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance was the unveiling of no mere partnership or collaboration. The alliance aims to marshal the strengths of all three institutions on behalf of the public’s health and well-being.

The initiative, which will be funded largely by UPMC to the tune of $10 million to $20 million a year, will process massive amounts of electronic health data — from insurance records, patient information, genomic profiles, wearable sensors and other sources — to help guide an individual’s medical treatment. This “big data” could also help physicians detect when a new outbreak in a personal ailment might occur and respond more rapidly, before a health problem grows larger.

Success of the alliance will hinge on UPMC’s vast patient data, Pitt’s health science research capabilities and CMU’s leadership in computer science and machine learning. Beyond the real-world diagnosis and care benefits for individual patients, the effort also seeks to spin off commercial businesses and create jobs."

Pitt, CMU and UPMC hope to remake health care via new big data alliance; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/16/15

Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Pitt, CMU and UPMC hope to remake health care via new big data alliance:

"Pittsburgh is making a big bet on big data.

UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University on Monday announced the formation of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance to “revolutionize health care and wellness” by using data to detect potential outbreaks as well as create health care innovations that will spawn spinoff companies.

The clinical goal, the leaders of the three institutions said, is to remake health care so that it is at once more computerized, yet more personalized, using millions of gigabytes of accumulated health records to predict and treat patients’ health issues in a manner far more specific than is possible today.

And the business development goal, the leaders said, is no less than a Pittsburgh-based “moonshot” for health information technology, one that could make Pittsburgh the global epicenter for such research.

If the alliance unfolds as outlined, it someday could rival the scope of the nation’s largest university-led data-sharing projects (such as the ongoing Dartmouth Atlas health policy research partnership with Dartmouth College) and its biggest artificial clinical intelligence projects (such as the IBM Watson team’s foray into the health care realm)."